


sounds like penance

by opheliahyde



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Ableist Language, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Gen, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:17:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1618946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opheliahyde/pseuds/opheliahyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers through <i>Boxman</i>: Based on the prompt <i>every year on the anniversary of his death, I visit my father's grave to make sure it took.</i> Seth comes to terms with his father's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sounds like penance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



“Do you hate me?” Richie asked one night.

His mouth hovered over Seth’s ear, both of them tucked in close to each other to fit on Uncle Eddie’s narrow couch. His breath was hot and his arms clamped tight around Seth, so he couldn’t turn to meet his eyes, clinging so he couldn’t leave.

Seth didn’t have an answer. “Why would I hate you?”  _How do you answer such a stupid question?_

Richie sucked in a breath behind him, his ribs pulling back until there was space between them. Seth thought he was going to hold it, the breath ( _he used to do that, hold and hold his breath until Seth had to slap his back and make him breathe, keep him from suffocating himself_ ), but he breathed out slow, body expanding until he was flush against Seth again. “For dad,” he said, voice small. “For letting him die.”

He had wanted to tell him, but his throat seized around the words, kept them lodged there as he swallowed around them. It was hard, still hard to say all he felt when he came to, head in Richie’s lap, the two of them collapsed on the patch of grass across the street from their house and Richie told him what happened.

 _Dad’s gone_ , he’d said, and Seth would have told him  _good_ , but all he could do was cough; there was relief in that, body wracked as Richie rubbed his hand all over his back, relief in the heat on the breeze, and the wail of sirens. Richie told him,  _dad didn’t get out_ , and Seth would have told him,  _I’m glad_ , if he could, as ugly as it felt.

“You saved me,” he breathed out, managed it like it was the only thing that mattered ( _because it was_ ).

 

_—_

 

Their dad has a plot in the back of some cemetery Seth always forgets the name of, but he can find his way there easy enough, feet following worn tracks. He finds his way there even though the world is tilting and he’s drunk, drunk like their dad used to get (I _’m not like you_ , he thinks, taking another swig from the bottle wrapped in brown paper and liking the burn, the alcohol building a fire in the pit of his stomach,  _I’m not_ ). Uncle Eddie had put up the money for a small headstone that only read his name and some dates—they’d buried an urn that held the cremated ashes of what was left of him.

Seth has thought it was stupid, burying a fucking  _urn_ , but later on it made sense—better he sit in the ground than be where no one wanted him. Sometimes he wished they’d kept his ashes, when he felt sharp, edging on explosion (he was a teenager and angry all the goddamn time, but he never hit anyone who couldn’t hit back; his fights were always fair and it eased some of the tension in his fists). He would have thrown the urn out the window, could have felt the sick, easing satisfaction of watching it shatter and him spill out and mix with the dirt.

They never had a funeral. No one would have come, they all knew that—no one would cry for Ray Gecko, not even his own brother. No one would miss that bastard.

The plot is unkempt, the barest of landscaping done around the small square stone that moss had begun to grow on.He tries to count the years, but they all blur together in his head, numbers not making sense because sometimes it feels fresh, like the heat was on his face just yesterday, like he’s still rubbing the smoke from his eyes. He doesn’t have anything but the bottle, but the old man can’t have that, would have liked it too much.

Seth spits instead, hitting the stone like he’d wanted to hit his face. Then he downs the bottle in one gulp.

It’s Richie that finds him ( _of course it is_ , he thinks, R _ichie will always find me_ ) and picks him up off the ground. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Seth,” he says, too loud, too close, fingers digging into his chin. “What did you do? Take a nap in a pile of glass?”

He tries to move his face, but it hurts like a million tiny pinpricks, like more than one something has lodged in his cheek. He tries to grab onto Richie when he sways, but his hands are useless, painful and swollen. He gets blood on Richie’s shirt ( _he won’t like that, but he’s had worse_ ).

“Fucking asshole,” he mutters, like he can hear him, like he hasn’t been dead for years.

Richie sighs, his hand coming up to cup the unwounded cheek, palm warm and Seth buries his aching head in his palm. “I know,” he says. “But he’s gone, Seth, he’s gone.”

He knows this,  _he knows_ —but sometimes he hears him, echoing at the back of his head all the goddamn awful shit he used to say, and Seth hasn’t yet figured out how to fight a ghost.

 

—

 

Seth tried to seek their mother out after.  _Dad’s gone, you can come back,_  he’d wanted to tell her, wondered if it’d make a difference, wanted to know who was right, _did she leave or was she driven away?_  Which story was right: he old man’s or Richie’s?

But it had been neither, he should have figured. Geckos keep secrets like bodies in trunks, sooner or later they start to smell.

Richie hadn’t wanted to help him look, told him,  _she’s long gone by now, Seth, let it go_ , in the voice that says he knows something, but he’s not telling. Uncle Eddie looked at him with pitying eyes that itched and scratched like too tight clothes, the kind of expression on his face that made Seth feel slow and stupid.

It all comes out of Richie’s mouth like vomit when Seth says,  _I think I found her_ , and Richie tells him,  _No you haven’t, that’s impossible, she’s dead._

It had been some other Maria Seth had found, but he thought it was her ( _wished it was her_ ); stupid fucking common name, Maria. There’s thousands of them, easy to find one with the right birth date and latch on.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he asks, and he tries not to be mad, but his hands curl in the collar of Richie’s shirt; he shakes him, pulling hard enough that the worn cotton tears. “Fuck, I’m not a child, I could have handled it—god, the things dad used to say about her—”

Richie was still, lets Seth pull at his clothes until he fell against him, absorbing some of his stillness and becoming calm himself while tears burned his eyes and he tucks his face in the crook of Richie’s neck. “It was a better story,” Richie whispers. “Her running away. Better ending than dead because dad fucked up and she paid the price.”

“I found her,” Richie says. The pieces fall together in Seth’s head.

Seth dreams that night he set the fire, lighter fluid slick on his hands as he poured it over him, a sleeping beast on the couch. The cigarette falls. Seth steps back and watches the flames erupt and engulf him, turn him to charred bone and cinders.

He wakes up gasping, Richie waking with him, hand heavy on his chest, holding him down and muttering, _breathe, Seth, breathe_ , in his ear until Seth settles, soaked with sweat, staring up at the ceiling.

Seth doesn’t remember his dreams after that.

 

—

 

Seth never told Vanessa until he does, let’s it spill past his lip, can’t tighten his jaw around it anymore. He hadn’t wanted to see the look in her eyes that she gives him now, soft and gentle, like he’s a wounded animal ( _pitying_ , like she’s ready to offer her sorrys and it’s not something he wants her to be sorry about). But the thought of leaving Richie seizes around his heart, squeezing until it stops, no more beating, no more breathing, no more Seth Gecko.

 _You think you owe him_ , Vanessa concludes, and he lets her, lets her have her simple explanation and get away with it—they’ve complicated her life enough, him and Richie. Sometimes he wants to apologize to her, for giving her two husbands for the price of one, but it’s far more complicated. It’s not a debt he can pay back because they keep paying it back and forth, taking hits for each other,spilling blood for each other, killing for each other—it gets under their skin and seeps in their marrow, no way to scrub it clean.

 _(He’s my blood_ , he wants to tell her, in the only way he can explain it,  _he’s a part of me; I can’t just cut off my fucking arm, no tourniquet, and expect to live.)_

 _I’m all he’s got_ , he yells until his throat is raw and it not a lie, but Seth’s always spoken in half-truths, white lies when he’s talked with Vanessa. He was too scared of the day when he tells her the whole truth, shines a light in every one of his dark corners and puts his skeletons on display, and she walks away—even though she ought to and he ought to let her. 

(Richie took the hits meant for him, sliding in the way before their dad’s fist connected with Seth’s gut, taking the brunt like he wasn’t a skinny nothing that might break more easily than Seth would. He never understood why he did that when he remembers how still he used to get when their dad had cornered him up against the wall, gone glassy-eyed as the old man yelled in his face— _hey retard, anyone fucking home?_  as he shook him, Richie’s glasses sliding down his nose,  _goddamn your mother for leaving me with a fucking defect like you_. How Richie could go away inside and come out shaking when Seth had chased the old man away, yet put himself in the line of fire each and every time for him. He’d asked him once and all he could do was shrug and say,  _you’re my brother_  and Seth had understood what he meant.)

When he says to Vanessa, _I’m all he’s got,_  he leaves out,  _and he’s all I got_  because he’s not sure how to explain that to her, how to explain how  _brother_  means more than  _wife_  because Richie’s blood is his blood and they’ve had their hands stained with it longer than he ever wore her ring.

 

—

 

“I set the fire,” Richie tells him years later, caught in a small room at the bottom of an ancient Aztec temple, and Richie isn’t exactly Richie anymore ( _except he is, even Seth can recognize that, glasses or no, his brother is still his brother—he just has a different sort of appetite now_ ). “I killed dad.”

Seth hears it and braces himself for a blow, but the feeling never comes, so his muscles relax and he slumps down against the wall. “I think I always knew that. Somewhere—” he says, raising his hand, fingers tapping at his temple, “—somewhere, in here.” He remembers their dad, or the memory of their dad, telling him something he already knew. It sat in his gut for the longest time, twisting until he eased the tension by putting a needle to his skin, etching out marks that said he didn’t care, didn’t fucking give a shit what their old man had to say.

(If Richie betrayed their blood by putting their dad to light, then he’d had betrayed their blood over and over again every time his fist hit Seth, or he threw Richie into the wall, spilling Gecko blood until it stained every room in the house—if Richie had done anything, he’d made it even, blood for blood.)

Richie stares like he’s always stared, focused and intense, whittling the world down to Seth and Seth only. “Do you hate me?” he asks again, like Seth will have a better answer this time, like asking the first time wasn’t stupid enough.

“You saved me,” Seth says, and hopes this time Richie will see the truth of it ( _you see enough of everything else, Richard, see this_ ). “You saved  _us_. So shut up about it, Richard, and help me get us out of here.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://richiesseth.tumblr.com)!


End file.
